Cohere builds private AI systems for enterprises and governments that need models and agents to run on infrastructure they control. The Toronto company, founded in 2019 by Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst, and Ivan Zhang, sells the Command family of language models for generation and retrieval, and North, an agent platform that can be installed on-premises, in a private cloud, or fully air-gapped so prompts and company data stay inside the customer's network. Buyers are banks, telecoms, healthcare organizations, manufacturers, energy firms, and public-sector teams that want agents in production without sending sensitive work to a public API. On October 29, 2026, Cohere announced the initial close of a Series E that targets up to CAD $7 billion and would value the company at CAD $35.7 billion. The company calls it the largest private financing ever undertaken by a Canadian technology company. The companies of Schwarz Group are leading. New investors include Bell Ventures, Bullhound Capital, and the Government of Canada, with Inovia Capital, NVIDIA, and Prosperity7 Ventures returning. The capital is earmarked for the modelling roadmap, products built for regulated industries, and the compute needed to train enterprise models. Ottawa's stake is tied to Cohere scaling from Canada. The round follows a year of shipping the agent product those customers are buying. North has been generally available since August 2025, and North 2, released in early October 2026, added tighter orchestration and admin controls over token spend and what each agent is allowed to do. Cohere said it ended the third quarter of 2026 with 165 percent year-over-year growth in annual recurring revenue, and that its customer base grew 20 times over the past year to 300, including RBC, TD Bank, Bell Canada, Fujitsu, and PwC. In the launch video, the founders kept to a familiar line: deploy the technology privately and securely so the people using it stay in control, and do not treat a signed round as a reason to over-celebrate.